Ever Happily
by Daughter of Atlas
Summary: [You can't choose your family, but you can choose your dog... or is it your dog who chooses you?] Essays on family, madness, and canine devotion. Barnabas reflects.
1. Beginning

**Title: **Ever Happily, Chapter 1

**Summary:** Memories, like dreams, can play tricks on you.

**Author's Note: **This story was originally very long, but I decided to break it up into several smaller parts. They're related, but not sequential. They don't form any particular story arc. They're just pieces of Barnabas, his life with Delirium, his life before Delirium, and what it's like to look at the Endless from the outside.

This particular one came about because Neil Gaiman, in his eternal wisdom, never told us where Barnabas came from, or how he got to where he did.

* * *

Barnabas entered the world in the general whenabouts of the nineteenth century (the exact year he doesn't know, and never did). He remembers, fuzzily, the not-quite-yet America that welcomed him with stink and squalor upon his birth. He remembers the dark and festering alleyway in which he had been whelped, along with two brothers and a sister whom he supposed had long since died.

He remembers the flea-infested fur and the warm heat of his mother, a mortal mangy German Shepherd bitch. She had growled to him in dog-tongue about his father, a wolf god of the red-skinned tribes who was being driven towards the sea and bludgeoned to death by the cross; he had chased and won half the bitches in the city and then departed.

Barnabas remembers the long, lightning-lit years of the old millennium. He remembers the dodging and hiding and scrounging for food, he remembers never staying in one place long enough to see his friends (or what passed for friends) wither and die. He remembers listening with ears pricked, under carriages and around corners, easily understanding the strange man-tongues that his companions could never decipher.

In those days he was nameless, wandering streets that all began to blur together, living by his wits and by his sarcasm, whispering to crazy old men in alleyways because they were the only ones who would believe a dog could talk.

He still remembers the day he met Destruction.

It had been a long and dreary day without any distinction whatsoever. He had been stretched out at the entrance of his then-den, a construction of cardboard boxes that kept him dry if not warm, when a big red-furred man carrying a knapsack had rounded the corner, tripped over his tail, turned and apologized in easy, fluent dog-tongue, not stumbling over the snarls and growls. (Barnabas learned later that the Endless can speak all languages, for they speak to something other than the ears, other than the mind).

And Barnabas had answered him in human-tongue, because if the stranger was courteous enough to speak in a dog's native language, then Barnabas could certainly return the favor. The big red-furred man had been thunderstruck for a moment, then had thrown his head back and roared with delight, a bellow loud enough and resonant enough to uproot trees.

From that moment on Barnabas had had a name, a home of sorts, and a friend. It had been wonderful, ecstatic, to have a purpose, and a name, and a steady companion, in the midst of crowds that sprang up and vanished again in the blink of a century. He remembers being happy, for the first time, with a steady, comfortable, dependable life.

Now he lives in a place that only occasionally remembers to be a place and not something else (for one memorable day it was a fish). His dearest companion is a girl whose hair resembles a drunk and reeling rainbow, a girl who is liable to turn into a chocolate banana when she forgets herself, which is often. His name is gone, still existing only in a small place in his own mind; Delirium calls him only 'doggy'. All traces of stability and normality are gone from his life.

And he loves it, loves living with Delirium and chasing her around candy-cane forests that are painted in Halloween colors, loves licking chocolate from her fingers only to find that it tastes like broccoli, if the broccoli had first been singed to a crisp and plunged into a vat of sugar.

For most of his life he remembers having been willing to give up anything for stability, and now he loves living what is arguably the least stable place-fish in the multiverse. He wonders why.

* * *

Tune in next week... but first, review, please. 


	2. Change

**Title: **Ever Happily, Chapter 2

**Summary: **Some things never change. Unfortunately, they're getting fewer and farther between.

**Author's Note: **This one is my first real attempt to try and describe Delirium's realm. It's hard, but I hope I did all right. You be the judge of that.

* * *

Curled up on a mattress of candyfloss card tricks, Barnabas sleeps. He drifts across a sea of pinstriped cathedral bells, and storm clouds swim through it like fish, only they aren't fish, they're giraffes, and the thundering of their hooves (wings?) wakes him up. He stands and strides out onto the shuddering stream of bells; deprived of his stabilizing presence, the candyfloss mattress explodes with the sound of a choir and the smell of scorched meat.

Barnabas walks across the water that was made of bells and now is made of mercury-flavored ice cream. The things he walks on are lilypads, but they're also mud puddles, and his paws squish and tingle unpleasantly and then they start to freeze and by the time he reaches the far shore his entire body is covered by a thin sheen of ice. He sneezes, and shakes, and a coat of butterflies lifts from his skin in vast irradiated swarms (they are painted with raw colors and shaped like screams).

The scream-butterflies fade, and in their wake Barnabas can hear Delirium's bright shattering laugh drifting towards him over the hills of thyme and Time, and he pricks up his ears and sniffs the air, although that won't do him any good because there's a low wash of television white noise today and the entire world smells, not unpleasantly, like yellow and viridian and chlorine.

Nonetheless, he thinks he sees a flash of multicolored spiked hair and pushes towards it in a half-swimming lope, only by the time he reaches the distant hilltop it's turned into Atlantis, and he knows there's no point in talking to Atlanteans, they can only gibber like monkeys and bellow like bulls.

But that's all right. Sometimes Barnabas forgets that nothing in Delirium's realm can be reached in a straight line. He'll find his mistress eventually, unless maybe he doesn't, or she'll find him, unless maybe she can't. He pulls himself together, regaining a little solidity and shaking his head to dislodge a pair of antennae sprouting where they shouldn't be. He drifts a little further inwards, toward the sundial at Delirium's heart.

The sundial is tall today, tall in the bizarre, depthless scale of Delirium's realm where dimensions only pretend to exist, and that only when the mood takes them. The sundial's plinth and pillar are wound about with tinsel, bedecked with garlands of wriggling silver fishes threaded on twine, and its face is twirling merrily, a shadow whirligig that has nothing to do with time at all.

Good. That means Delirium is in a good mood today, and Barnabas has been surprised to discover how desperately he wants her to be happy. (_Happy, _a passing clown face whispers, _happy happy everyone happy whether they like it or not or not or else. if they don't like it then the happy smile-knife let out the happy red rushing to burble and giggle-glug happy down the drain._)

At least the sundial still exists. There's always a moment of anxiety when Barnabas approaches it, and prays it's still there; it is the only thing remaining more or less constant in Delirium's shifting, splattering realm, and he's come in some bizarre way to depend upon it. Not as a measure of sanity, he's too used to being Delirium's companion to look for or put much stock in that. It's more like a reassurance, a promise that the explosions and bubbles around him are only the normal explosions and bubbles, and nothing more painful or more sinister.

It's odd that he should be thinking of Destruction, but more and more often now Barnabas finds thoughts of the big pseudo-man leaping up from his unconsciousness when he least expects them. Maybe because Destruction was always so unchanging, so solid; and now he, Barnabas, has become the only solid thing in a fickle and convulsive world, and he needs a past example to show him what to do. His tongue lolls out and he laughs silently at himself as he thinks it, but maybe he's digging up his memories of Destruction in a quest for security, a search for guidance.

Barnabas understands how Destruction – or Dream, or Death, or any of them – must have felt, must still feel, when they step into the waking world only to find that everything they knew and loved and hated is gone, that everything around is strange and new, though they'd been gone only for a moment (this morning Barnabas lived in a little wooden doghouse; now it is evening, and his doghouse is a whale). He thinks he's beginning to understand the gratitude, the attachment that they feel towards those things that remain unchanged for thousands and millions of years; those things that are constants.

Destruction never spoke of his family, but as soon as that back-room pool started bubbling a vast and timeless loneliness had appeared in his eyes, in his posture, in his gait. Barnabas had sensed it. He had sensed Destruction's need for him as well, the need for a steady companion who, even though he was annoying and sarcastic at times, posed no threat of leaving or crumbling into dust.

The dog feels a similar attachment to the sundial at the heart of Delirium's realm. Though he knows it's stupid and childish (puppyish?) he finds himself needing, longing for at least one thing that will never change…

His train of thought is interrupted by a high, piercing squeal of laughter that shoots over his head like a bolt of lightning, and then Delirium is tumbling down a hill that didn't exist a moment before and she scoops him up in her arms and they're tumbling together, bypassing gravity without noticing, and Barnabas' wagging tail beats against the reassuring solidity of his mistress as he licks her cheek.

* * *

Review, please!


	3. Drama

**Title: **Ever Happily, Chapter 3

**Summary: **The Endless, from an audience's perspective. Daytime TV has nothing on this.

**Author's Note: **There's probably too much straight description in this one, but I'm fond of it all the same. I throw myself on your tender mercy, reader.

* * *

Today, Barnabas is watching a puppet show.

He finds his mind is becoming more and more non-linear the longer he stays in Delirium's realm, so that he finds it very difficult to follow the thread of the story. But that might be because Delirium is the one telling it, and _her_ mind is not linear at all, or circular or spherical or even hexagonal, for that matter (dodecahedron-oid is probably the closest that mortal geometry can come, but the best approximation is really a black hole or the shape of time travel).

The puppets themselves don't even seem to fully understand the story they are acting out. They keep shifting and blurring around the edges, as though yearning desperately to break free of their confines and be something else. They seem hopelessly and perennially confused, although all things considered Delirium is doing a rather good job of keeping them in the shapes they're supposed to be. Barnabas knows how difficult this is for her, and he beats his tail against the firmament in silent applause for her effort.

He manages to recognize them, barely, and he is still logical enough to deduce the identities of those he's never met. Death is less of a puppet and more of a plushie doll, all soft and cuddly-looking, with a wide smile on her face and bright, sparkling, warm glass-bead eyes. Her long black hair hangs down in strings, and the small curling mark under her eye has been painstakingly painted with a child's marker on the pale white cloth of her face. A tiny silver ankh hangs around her neck on a tiny silver chain, and it jingles as she moves.

Dream is a wooden doll whose joints have been frozen stiff. He walks with a jerking, mechanical gait, he trails a black cloak behind him on the ground like the dreary tail-feather train of a bedraggled bird, and his eyes are black pits. His skin is the dark, drained color of thunderheads, and every so often the front half of his stoic face swings outward on hinges, revealing a cluster of Dream-imps laughing hysterically in his skull cavity, where his brain should have been. A little mechanical raven sits and croaks incessantly on his shoulder without moving its beak. It seems, to the best of Barnabas's ability to guess, to be talking about Disney films.

Desire is the very opposite of Death, sharp and hard where the other is warm and soft; Desire seems to be made of cutting edges, which is impossible because its figure is sculpted in curves, but Barnabas has become accustomed to the impossible and hardly notices. Desire is a wooden marionette, but it is also a wicked-bladed scythe, a switchblade on a spring ready to leap forward, to cut and to rend, on the slightest provocation. Its tawny eyes are quite literally burning, crackling and raging and spitting out sparks. Barnabas finds himself a little bit intimidated by it, a little bit afraid of it, even though it's only a puppet under Delirium's pale, spidery hand.

Destiny is just a little miniature carved in stone, incapable of any kind of movement at all. Despair is a plump and sagging naked woman with a rat-tail, with gray wrinkled skin like she'd been soaked in water too long, and protruding teeth that made her look more gorilla than human.

Destruction is a toy soldier, tall by puppet standards, with broad shoulders and a wide painted grin and a scarlet uniform bedecked with shiny gold buttons, which contrast the bristling red mass of his beard (which Barnabas has never seen before, as Destruction had shaved it off by the time they met). Barnabas is only able to recognize his old friend by Delirium's (eerily accurate) imitation of his laugh. In all other aspects the Destruction-puppet resembles no one so much as the Nutcracker, the old childhood hero coming to the rescue of the sugar fairy princess.

The puppets, Barnabas knows, are not a reflection of reality at all. They do not depict the Endless as they really are; they show Delirium's family as Delirium sees them. The puppets show what the Endless look like through Delirium's eyes.

It is a fascinating glimpse into Delirium's universe, but Barnabas is too distracted to draw many conclusions. He is too busy watching the puppets prance and caper, directed by Delirium's fingers high in the air above them. She controls them like marionettes, but seems to have forgotten that they should be on strings.

It is a fascinating drama, to say the least. Dream and Death are arguing, with Destiny quietly cracking apart and crumbling and reassembling himself in the background. Desire is laughing wildly and cruelly, flashing fangs that look like needles and waving fingers tipped with knives. Despair sulks in Desire's shadows (the androgyne has two; one male, one female), and rats climb all over Despair's desiccated body until she is only a writhing lump of squeaks and fur.

The conflict between Death and Dream comes to an explosive conclusion, as Death throws up her hands and stalks away, with little wisps of steam curling from her lanky threads of hair. Dream stands woodenly, listlessly, apparently deflated and without purpose now that his battle with his sister is ended.

Desire steps forward from the background to fill the void, and calmly proceeds to slice Dream up into a pile of splintered pieces with its finger-claws. It sits down next to this grisly cairn of flesh and begins fishing morsels of Dream out on the tips of its fingers and popping them into its mouth. Relaxed and reposing, Desire is gnawing delicately on what would have been the Dream-puppet's bones.

Death comes storming back onto the scene, and is apparently enraged by Desire's lustful fratricide. She gestures angrily and a gust of fire leaps out at the androgyne, but Desire easily leans aside, and the inferno catches Despair instead. The rats flee in terror from the tentacles of fire now crawling over Despair's skin. Despair herself does not scream, or run, or even flinch. She only stands morosely, burning, looking gloomily up at her twin as though begging for forgiveness.

Destruction has until now been standing with his back to his siblings, a little wooden bayonet poking over one shoulder, but at this latest outrage he turns, waving his hands and shouting in a little puppet voice which is the sound of a bass drum shrunk to the size of a thimble. His voice has a gloss of the old brass timbre Barnabas remembers, but it is unable to calm the Endless, who are beginning to shout and seethe, sometimes seven, sometimes more; they are wavering and threatening to collapse.

The turmoil is finally calmed by a fanfare of trumpets and birds of paradise that rings out over the tableau. The Endless pause in their fighting and turn as one towards the source of the sound; even Dream's severed head rotates from its position on the firmament. Another puppet comes dancing onto the scene out of oblivion, and Barnabas understands in an instant that this must be Delirium herself.

The newcomer is a beautiful fairy sugarcane princess, pink-glossed and tinsel-bedecked, with great crumpled shimmering wings trailing from her shoulders and gills quavering in her neck. She dances out among her siblings with inhuman grace, and her footsteps are the trills of birds.

The Delirium-puppet grips Destruction by the hand, drawing him up among his siblings again. She leans down to scold the seated Desire, who at first only pokes out a perfectly pink and pointed tongue, but eventually gives in and stands. Its head is bowed contritely, its sharp edges already beginning to sand themselves away.

The Delirium-puppet blows a kiss to the jumble of puppet-flesh that once was Dream, and the skeleton instantly resurrects itself, only this time he's clad in white and no longer laughing behind his face.

At a gesture from the Delirium-puppet, the flames that plague Despair are extinguished and a smile spreads across the gruesome gorilla face. Destiny stops its hourglass tumbling of sand and stone, stays solid and actually begins to grin, begins to laugh.

Then the Delirium-puppet (who might be Delight) forms her siblings into a circle around her, and they all dance a spinning dance, clutching each other's hands, in perfect harmony and fondness and love.

The Endless dance for some time, but eventually they fall into piles on the ground and begin to snore, sleeping happily. The festivities concluded, Delight strides off, arm-in-arm with Death, to sit in front of a movie screen the size of an envelope on which flabby faces open and close like the mouths of fish.

"The EnD," Delirium (the real one, not the puppet) burbles happily, as the miniature dramatis personae dissolve back into the wisps of raw firmament from which they came. "Did u like it, doggie? did u?"

But before Barnabas can collect himself enough to answer, half of a hippopotamus goes drifting past and Delirium is scampering after it in hot pursuit (she leaves a trail of flame behind her like the track of a star), leaving the dog to sit and wonder at a clenched-tight churning discomfort in his stomach, in his soul.

He never met Delight. He wonders if she really would have been capable of fixing the family messes which Destruction used to rant about at length. He wonders if she really could have made the whole world happy and bright and made family love each other and get along.

Maybe it's just the effect of being too near Delirium for too long, but Barnabas finds himself yearning inexplicably for the warm worm-ridden heat of his mother. He wants to be happy with his family that he never had, and he wants Delirium to be happy in hers. He finds himself miserable for no reason (probably looking too logically at things Delirium takes in stride). He finds himself missing Delight, and he never even knew her…

Delight is gone, replaced by Delirium; happiness traded for insanity. Maybe that's why the family of the Endless fell apart.

* * *

Review, please. 


	4. Delirium and Dream

**Title: **Ever Happily, Chapter 4

**Summary: **Barnabas understands Delirium, which is never a good sign. Maybe it would have been only a matter of time until he ended up hers.

**Author's Note:** I imagine that the Endless must sometimes get tangled up into each others' realms. I also imagine that Death might get curious about mortal customs. I imagine a lot of things; that's why I'm a fanfiction writer.

* * *

Time passes. Time is undifferentiated here in the wellspring of insanity, time roars in like a tidal wave that crashes up and on and through. Barnabas has learned to listen to his own heartbeat, and he uses it as a sort of clock during the hours that burst like butterflies from cocoons. Now it is thundering, pounding against his ribs as he runs, throwing himself around corners in merry pursuit of a flitting white dream.

The colorscape falls away beneath him, dipping and rolling into chasms as though eager to join in the game. Barnabas lets his tongue loll out to slap against the side of his face in the wind of his flight, he revels in the feeling of his ears whipping back (how long has it been since he's had a proper chase?). As he reaches the summit of the next hill he lets himself slip, tumbling down in a shower of anthracite pebbles to catch his ethereal quarry gently in his mouth.

He stands slowly, carefully, mindful of his teeth as the dream beats and flutters feebly against his jaws. His fangs press gently into a soft body, which is in the squirming shape of a giant maggot, and the taste on his tongue is that of a pigeon he once ate in Paris. As he starts making his way back up the slope, a passing fancy whispers to him that his prey is a drunk-dream and that if he bites too hard on it, it will puncture and deflate in a rush of sulfurous air. Barnabas has no reason to disbelieve this, so he loosens his bite a little more.

As he gains the hilltop the world around him explodes into sudden applause. Delirium is standing before him without warning, throwing up her hands and singing a song that seems to be "my doggie is so clever, he caught Dream's little white worm," and then a flock of disembodied hands swoops in, clapping wildly, and Barnabas manages to cock one front leg into an awkward sort of bow.

A shimmering takes shape in the air beside Delirium, a patch of dislocation that is different from the normal shimmering. It becomes vaguely man-shaped, and solidifies into a drear silhouette that Delirium greets with a squeal of glee and Barnabas welcomes with a joyful dream-muffled bark.

Morpheus is clad in formal mercury-embossed regalia, flowing robes, and his insectoid helm of office. He holds up a finger to quiet his psychedelic relation and her horde of hands. His hands fumble at the back of the helmet, lifting it from his head, and by the time it clears his eyes the formal robes are gone and instead he's dressed in a simple gray t-shirt and jeans. The helmet itself, with its bubble-curved eyes of red glass, has become a soccer ball cradled against one bony white forearm.

"My dear sister" Dream intones, and bows (he never merely speaks, he always drones or intones; he has no choice, his very voice is hollow and rattling with deep brass-bass timbres).

Delirium squeals at being so greeted and throws her arms around her brother (and a little bit through), planting a great wet multicolored kiss on his cheek. It remains burned there for a moment as the blue embers in Dream's eyes leap into crackling flame and swirl confusedly, but then he blinks and shakes his head and the madness subsides (though his disheveled hair might be a bit more disheveled than before).

He turns now to Barnabas, greeting him with the same formal bow and solemnly intoned, "Friend dog." Bent over, he holds out his hand expectantly, and Barnabas drops the fat white dream into Dream's thin white fingers. It instantly becomes small, and as Dream straightens up he tucks it into a back pocket of his jeans, shifting the soccer ball to rest on his hip.

"Delirium," he begins, then hesitates, looking perplexed, then starts again. "Delirium – Del – have you… have you been to see our older sister, of late?"

"Oh! She's nice!" Delirium squawks, through a bird-beak that swells and subsides over her mouth. "she gave me a frog once and i said why cause i can make frogs, but hers was green and it went _CrOaK cRoAk_ and it didn't POP when i poked it and she said this ones real, and i tried to feed it fireflies, or maybe flying fire, I forget, and it died. So I made it alive again but I don't have it any more because now I have my doggie," and she points to the empty space a foot to Barnabas' left.

"Yes," Dream answers patiently, "but have you visited her lately?"

"Not lately!" Delirium chirps, indignant. "Earlily, not lately!"

Dream seems satisfied with this answer and Delirium appears to have lost interest, so it is left to Barnabas to ask the salient question; "Why do you ask?"

"Hmm?" Dream looks surprised at having been thus questioned, but raises the soccer ball in a ready answer. "Because our oldest sister has invited me to engage in a meaningless mortal game, and I wondered if perhaps yourself or Delirium had a hand in it… or a paw," he amends hastily, as Delirium proudly sticks out her hands for his inspection and he realizes that they are furry and four-fingered.

Now Delirium notices the ball, and lets out an ear-splitting shriek that lances needle-like past Dream's head. "Oh, a ball! I want to play with it! Can I play with the ball, Dream, can I please? I could throw it for my doggie to chase and it could go all runny runny runny on spiny centipided legs and my doggie only has four not-spiny ones but he would be faster and it would be fun! Oh, please, Dream, if I gave you cherry stones that said you were a kangaroo?"

"I believe the cherries go on top of the request," Dream replies, unperturbed. "And I am afraid I cannot give you the ball. I need it for our older sister's game, and it would be most inconvenient if it were to grow insect legs, or sprout horns, or fly away."

He bows again, deeply as any courtier paying respects to a queen. "I wish you well, my fair sister," he says solemnly, and he bows to Barnabas as well, "and I thank you, Messire Barnabas, for your service. Dreams occasionally wander into this realm, lost in the minds of their dreamers, and I hope I will be able to depend on your aid when this occurs in the future."

Barnabas opens his mouth to say something to the affirmative, but Dream is already fading, the checkered sphere spinning effortlessly on the tip of one finger. His voice echoes back from the distant shores of the Dreaming, low and musing; "Although, centipede legs may make the game more interesting…" and then he is gone.

Delirium is gone as well, and Barnabas turns his head to see her sulking in a corner she's constructed for the occasion. Her hair is hanging lank and damp, its color bleached away; her mouth is turned down into a pretty pout, and Barnabas can hear her muttering to herself, "… stupid mean old Dream, thinks he's all kingy and stuff and won't let me play with his buggy-ball, all laughing at me behind his face. Stupid Dream. I hate him. I hate you!" she shouts, and sticks her tongue out at where Dream had been standing a moment ago. Barnabas thinks about the neon kiss she gave Dream not two minutes ago and he shakes his head, his ears flopping to and fro with the motion.

Delirium's shout scares up a flock of revelations, which rise up from beyond a nearby putty-hill, cawing and cackling in alarm. Their cries fill the air (_they're all out to get you, you're a god, you're a monster, the world's a machine_) and Barnabas is so blinded by the noise that he doesn't see the one revelation, shaped like a toad or a toadstool, that breaks away from the flock. He blinks and can see again, but by then it's too late and the revelation is diving for him, it slips into one ear and into his brain and then it's far too late; he understands.

He understands how hate and love are nearly the same and of equal intensity; he understands that delirium (and Delirium, for that matter) is in large part just explosions of extreme emotion, love and hate without reason, without condition, cause, or cease. He's seen Delirium loathe people because they've spoken harshly or looked funny or denied her something; he's seen her deal out horrific punishments for imaginary crimes, without really even understanding what she was doing. He's also seen her fall in love on sight, collapse into admiration and adoration; he's seen her keep going back to those who despise her, he's seen her crawl back, a beaten puppy, to gaze adoringly up at the one who beat her. Barnabas understands that to be insane, to be Delirium, is to love madly without betrayal and to hate offhandedly, without guilt, and to do more of the former than of the latter. It's a weird sort of solidity in chaos, being sure that the only thing that will never change is the changingness of everything, including oneself.

Under the influence of the revelation roosting in his head, Barnabas realizes that Delirium loves Dream, loves him with unswerving devotion, because he's her family, and the love turned to hate for a minute but even now it's beginning to turn back. He understands that Delirium loves Death who is kind to her and Destiny who is indifferent; she loves Destruction who was gentle, and Desire who is cruel. Barnabas realizes that she loves _him_ with that same puppyish love; and that he loved Destruction that way, immediately and irrevocably. He loves Delirium that way as well.

Canine devotion. Hadn't Destruction talked about that once? How dogs are supposed to be the epitome of unconditional love, love the hand that feeds you and the hand that beats you, the voice that praises and the voice that shouts, both equally and entirely?

To love blindly is obviously insane, and Barnabas realizes that maybe all dogs are a little bit Delirium's because of that capacity to love as wide as the universe and as thick as heart's blood. Maybe it was only a matter of time before he was drawn fully into Delirium's realm, pulled there by his adoration of Destruction (what can be more delirious than to adore an anthropomorphic personification of crumbling cities and bursting bombs?). And now Barnabas feels that same singular, lunatic dedication of dog to master; he feels it creeping up on him again, making him of a piece with the giraffes that explode like dynamite and the fishes that sing like stars.

He shakes himself vigorously, dislodging the squawking revelation, and pulls himself together. Even if insanity is no more than unchecked emotion tie-dyed, even if his canine devotion to his mistress is insane, those ideas and its implications can wait. Right now Delirium is making her own soccer ball out of cloud and stray obsessions, and Barnabas trots off to remind her that obsessions aren't solid enough to kick.

Someone's got to look out for her, after all.

* * *

Amen to that.

Morpheus will live on forever, in our hearts and in our dreams.

All hail Neil Gaiman.

Review!


End file.
